Infrared Small Marine Target Detection Based on Spatiotemporal Dynamics Analysis

It is a big challenge to detect and track small infrared marine targets in non-stationary and time-varying sea clutter because the signal is too strong to be estimated. Based on the phenomenon that sea clutter spreads not only in the temporal domain but also in the spatial domain, this paper proposes an infrared small marine target detection algorithm based on spatiotemporal dynamics analysis to improve the performances of sea clutter suppression and target detection. The moving sea clutter is modeled as the spatial-temporal phase space, and the dynamical parameters of the sea clutter in the spatiotemporal domain are extracted from the sea clutter image sequence. Afterwards, the temporal dynamics reconstruction function and the spatial dynamics reconstruction function are built based on these extracted dynamical parameters. Furthermore, the space-time coupling coefficient and the spatiotemporal dynamics reconstruction function are estimated by means of a radial basis function (RBF) neural network to reconstruct the propagation regularity of the moving sea clutter. Finally, the sea clutter is suppressed by subtracting the estimated image from the original image, and then the target is detected in the suppressed image using the constant false alarm rate (CFAR) criteria. Some experiments on the small marine target in various fluctuating sea clutter image sequences are induced, and the experimental results show that the proposed algorithm could achieve outstanding performances in sea clutter suppression and small target detection.